Size 4 Jeans

My husband and I attended his company’s Christmas party in December. It was one of those parties in a nice hotel that started with a cocktail hour and went on with a buffet dinner, and dancing afterwards. The “dress” for the evening was suit and tie for the men, and evening wear for the women, so it was a fine excuse for me to purchase a new dress, have my hair done, and generally be frivolous.

Aside from my own frivolity, I find parties like this to be completely stupid and pointless, and the only reason I go is because my husband is high enough in the company hierarchy that he feels we need to be there, for some completely mysterious reason that I, not having a management degree, don’t understand. Every year, he calls me from the office in mid-November and says “Do you want to go to the Christmas party?” and I say “Why are you asking me this?” Since he feels we need to be there, it’s pretty silly to ask me if I want to go, especially when he knows the answer is a resounding “no!”

What’s wrong with parties like this? Here comes my soapbox recitation: Firstly, every one that I’ve ever been to is “buffet style.” Yuck! Just…YUCK! Even if the food is marginally good, by the time you stand around in the buffet line at least once and haul your plate(s) full of food back to your table it’s more than likely cold, and really, is the food ever better than “marginally good” to begin with? And if the food isn’t marginally good at serving temperature, it’s going to be downright awful cold. And then there’s the issue of touching the same serving utensils that 100 other people have touched whilst filling your plate, and then sitting down to eat your food. Sure, you could head for the restroom to wash your hands between filling your plate and sitting down to eat, but that provides even more time for the food on your plate to chill.

Secondly, assuming you’re lucky enough to be seated with people who have anything interesting to say, the tables at parties of this nature are too large for comfortable conversation with your tablemates, since the tables tend to be round and seat 10-12 people. Even with everyone rubbing elbows like they usually are when cutting their meat, a round table that seats 10-12 in any comfort at all is large enough that talking to anyone not sitting right next to you is a chore, and usually requires raising your voice or even (dare I say) shouting to be heard. Read the rest of this entry »

1. Getting married. Don’t get me wrong. Getting married is fine, but once is enough. To get married again I’d have to do the “big D” and if I do that, I sure won’t get married again anyway, so there you have it!
2. Having kids. Again, don’t get me wrong here, but two is enough! If I manage to survive the two I have with my sanity intact, I’ll be doing well.
3. Joining a group of women to do anything. Think quilt or craft guilds, reading groups, PTAs, whatever. Women in groups of more than two are a PITA.
4. Buying a couch that doesn’t have the back cushions attached. I HATE the couch and loveseat in my living room. The back cushions are just pillows, and it never looks neat after someone sits on them. No one in the house but me can figure out how to arrange them properly either, so I either have to blow it off and deal with it looking like crap or fix it myself constantly. Grrrr.
5. Working outside the home in a “real job.” So yeah, I’m spoiled. With any luck I’ll continue to be spoiled so that I don’t have to put up with all the politics and social jockeying that goes along with working in an office or something like that. With a little more luck, I won’t have to be “spoiled” too much longer because the work I do at home will start buying more than Starbucks daily…
6. Buying vampire books by Anne Rice. I liked them until the fourth or fifth one, and then she just got toooo weird. I’m not even sure I can stomach reading the first ones anymore. Isn’t it funny how our taste changes as we get older?

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s rare that I pick up a fashion/beauty magazine these days. I just don’t have the time for it, and don’t get much out of them anymore anyway. Once in a while (like once a year) I’ll pick up something like Elle if I’m traveling by plane and just want some fluff to read on the way. I used to read them all the time; Seventeen, Cosmo, Bazaar, Vogue, Vanity Fair. They all found their way into my mailbox at one time or another when I was younger.

I remember feeling like I wasn’t pretty when I was younger, and I had really poor self esteem from the time I was a teenager until I was in my early thirties. I have to say that I think the media and magazines contributed to the problem. Looking at all those perpetually beautiful people in magazines and movies and on TV, I thought I’d never measure up. My mother never understood what the problem was, and never tried to as far as I could tell then or now.

I don’t remember ever having the kind of conversations with my mother that I have with my own daughter about why the magazines and movies and TV aren’t real, and how those people don’t really look like that off the camera, because the photos are all airbrushed and Photoshopped to make perfection seem real. Frankly, I think my mother was jealous of me because I was thin and she wasn’t, and she never wanted to have children anyway (so she’s repeatedly told me), so maybe that was part of the reason for her attitude.

I never thought I was fat when I was younger though, not even when I looked at all the models in the magazines. I was at least sensible enough to realize that “fat” just wasn’t anything close to what I was. In fact, I wished for more curves, because “sexy” to me was a Victoria’s Secret model, and I had bones, not curves and no breasts to speak of at all. I was a stick until I had kids, and I didn’t have any breasts until I could afford to fix that problem with a trip to the plastic surgeon when I was 30. Read the rest of this entry »

Are teenagers worse today than they were 20 years ago? What I really want to know is what we’ve done wrong, that we have a teenager who thinks the world owes her everything, just because she breathes. She’s always just one step away from being hateful because she can’t have something she wants.

Example 1: She’s been begging (okay, most of the time it’s more like demanding) for us to take her skiing for ages. My husband finally caves in, and makes arrangements for a ski week, including lessons for everyone (except me; I don’t ski and don’t want lessons either). She said she wanted to learn to snowboard, and my husband needs more skiing lessons and my youngest hasn’t ever skied at all. After the plans are firmly in place, the announcement is made, but the teenager isn’t happy because the trip is not taking her to Switzerland! So fine, she won’t go. She can stay home with me and eat frozen food. Whatever.

Example 2: She dropped her digital camera, which she’s never kept in a case despite the fact that we made sure that she got to pick out the “perfect” case for it when it was new. After dropping it (and probably due in part to all the prior abuse), it didn’t work anymore, and she expected us to just lay down the credit card to buy her a new one, post haste. “But what am I supposed to do without a camera?” she says. WTF?

This kid has a serious problem understanding the difference between rights and privileges. “Rights” in this family are: a place to live, food to eat, clothing to wear. This does not mean that I have to buy special food, like applesauce in single serving tubs (because she’s too lazy to open a jar and put the applesauce into a dish) or special protein water, or buy her fancy designer clothing that she likes and just “has to have.” The food and clothing just have to fuel and cover her body, respectively. If we’re nice enough (or can afford) to buy her special food and clothing, that’s a privilege.

Going skiing anywhere is a privilege, which is clearly not understood either. I soooo appreciate the school she went to in 8th grade that decided skiing was “team building” and made it a required part of the curriculum to send my child on the class trip to Switzerland that year. Read the rest of this entry »

To go way back in this Size 4 story, I was a shapeless stick with bony parts sticking out in spots as a child. I was always thin no matter what I ate, which I didn’t fully appreciate at the time. Food was okay as long as it was something I liked, which was the tricky part, being a picky little thing back then.

And no, I was not anorexic, as doctors used to worry with pointed looks at my mom during those yearly checkups during childhood. Okay, maybe I was technically anorexic based on my height and weight, but I didn’t throw up my food voluntarily to stay thin. That’s just gross. But I couldn’t gain weight. It was physically difficult, if not impossible. I actually tried to gain weight once, because I thought the Army sounded like a good idea and they wouldn’t let me enlist if I didn’t weigh 120 pounds or something. I ate and ate, and still was 1.5 pounds shy of the minimum, and I finally gave up trying to get in and considered it their loss (thank goodness I came to my senses, I decided later, olive drab not being my color and all). I lost that “extra” weight that I put on for the Army in short order with no effort beside just eating normally, and when I got married at 22, I carried only 94 pounds on my 5′8″ frame. Can you say “skin and bones?”

Yup, that was too thin. I was often sick, since I guess my immune system was not up to snuff because I was sooo thin. I wonder what my husband saw in that stick, sometimes. Cooking dinner every night added ten pounds to my body in about a year though, and having babies completed the transformation from “stick” to “pear.” Then I had hips, but no boobs. Read the rest of this entry »

Back to what I was thinking about in the beginning, before I was interrupted by that miss you thing. Yes, I intend to be wearing a size 4 when I die, as I said.

I turned 40 earlier this year, and while the years have been good to my shape I know it won’t last without some intervention on my part. I’ll say it again, I HATE exercise. Blech. It’s not fun, and no matter how much I tell myself it should be, can be, will be fun and good for me, I still HATE it. Yes, that four letter word, HATE, will always be capitalized when it’s attached to the word “exercise.” Get used to it. BUT (and that’s a big “BUT,” which is also something I don’t like!), I like clothes. Specifically, I like having LOTS of clothes to choose from, so I can wear what fits my mood any particular day, or go without doing laundry for a couple of weeks. Yeah, I hate laundry too, but note the lack of capitalization on that one. Laundry doesn’t produce the same level of angst as exercise does, for sure.

The problem with the clothing is that if your weight goes up, your clothes don’t fit right. Jeans aren’t comfortable if they’re cutting into the fat on your hips (aside from being even more uncomfortable in more sensitive regions), and they don’t look good if they’re so tight that you’ve got muffin tops above the waistband. That muffin tops vision is courtesy of my daughter’s sixth grade Australian English teacher. She was a hoot, and she told her students that one day, that they shouldn’t wear jeans that were so tight that they caused muffin tops to show!

So what to do if your jeans are too tight? Buy more in a bigger size? No, no, no my friend. Never do that. If you do that, there’s no incentive to lose those muffin tops now is there? Read the rest of this entry »

Let me be completely clear at the outset: The title of this blog says exactly what I mean. Size 4 Jeans, ’til death do us part. Put simply, I fully intend to be wearing size 4 clothing when I die. I wear a size 4 now, and I expect that it won’t change.

This does not, however, say anything as to why I would call my blog that. The title is a result of a fair amount of convoluted thinking that started when I woke up yesterday morning. It’s difficult to reconstruct the exact stream of consciousness at this point, but in the interest of back story, I’ll give it a go:

I woke up thinking “damn, I really should try to exercise, but I really HATE it. Being 40 probably means that I can’t skate by much longer on metabolism alone, and every year it gets harder to keep my weight where I want it. And yeah, I may be thin, but I’m not fit. But I HATE exercise! Maybe if I started a blog to keep track of the ups and downs, maybe interact with some readers who had the same feelings or could share some new fitness activities, that would motivate me.

“Of course, then there are all the people that look at me and say ‘what do you have to gripe about? You’re thin, you look great!’ like I have less of a right to be conscious of my weight than they do, or the people who say ‘yeah, right, where from?’ when I say I need to lose five pounds if the subject comes up in conversation. That kind of thing really pisses me off. I’m not obsessed about my weight, I’m just conscious of it, and if I’m conscious of this five pounds now I won’t need to lose 20 later. I should be able to say what I like about my weight, without being quiet because I’m in a room full of people who have more to lose than I.”

And that set me off on a whole round of things that I sometimes don’t say because of someone else, things I get irritated about, things I wonder about or have to get out of my system, or things I just want to chat about. I spent an hour or two brainstorming about these types of things, so there’s lots of content waiting to get put on the screen that I won’t talk about on my other blog. No, I’m not telling where that other blog is, because nobody needs to know that. Read the rest of this entry »